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Pearl Dykstra is Professor of Empirical Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Deputy Chair of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the Cabinet of European Commissioners.

Pearl Dykstra was appointed chair of Empirical Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2009. Previously, she had a chair in Kinship Demography at Utrecht University and was a senior scientist at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) in The Hague. She was director of research of the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at the EUR between 2015 and 2019. She serves as Scientific Director ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economics Innovations.

She is an…

Pearl Dykstra is Professor of Empirical Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Deputy Chair of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the Cabinet of European Commissioners.

Pearl Dykstra was appointed chair of Empirical Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2009. Previously, she had a chair in Kinship Demography at Utrecht University and was a senior scientist at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) in The Hague. She was director of research of the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at the EUR between 2015 and 2019. She serves as Scientific Director ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economics Innovations.

She is an internationally regarded specialist on intergenerational solidarity, aging societies, family change, aging and the life course, and loneliness. In 2012 she received an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant for the research project “Families in context”, which focuses on the ways in which policy, economic, and cultural contexts structure intergenerational and gendered dependencies in families.

Large scale projects for which she has been awarded grants include the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS) and the EU 7th Framework programme MULTILINKS. She is consortium member of the Generations and Gender Programme (GGP), which is on the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Facilities.

She is an elected member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, 2004) and served as Vice-President from 2011-2016. She was an elected member of the Dutch Social Sciences Council (SWR) from 2006-2016. In 2010 she was elected as fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, and in 2016 as fellow of Academia Europaea. She was appointed to the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the Cabinet of European Commissioners in 2015, and has been serving as its deputy chair since 2016.

She became a member of the Board of the Social Sciences and Humanities Division of NWO in 2016. Since 2017 she has been serving on the Governing Board of the International Science Council.

For more information on her research, please visit the following websites:

T. Fokkema & P.A. Dykstra (2002). Differences in depression between married and divorced women in the Netherlands: In search of an explanation. The Netherlands' Journal of Social Science Research , 38, 24-47.

J. de Jong-Gierveld & P.A. Dykstra (2002). The long-term rewards of parenting. Ageing International : Journal of the International Federation on Ageing, 27, 49-69.

P.A. Dykstra & J. De Jong-Gierveld (1994). The theory of mental incongruity, with a specific application to loneliness among widowed men and women. In In R. Erber & Gilmour (Eds.), Theoretical frameworks in personal relationships (pp. 235-259). Erlbaum: Hillsdale, NJ

P.A. Dykstra, J. De Jong-Gierveld & E. Beekink (1994). A growing challenge: The very old. In Population growth and demographic structure (pp. 295-324). Proceedings of the United Nations Expert Group Meeting on Population Growth and Demographic Structure, Paris, 16-20 November (convened in preparation for the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, 5-13 September, 1994)

P.A. Dykstra, C. Bühler, T. Kogovšek & V. Hlebec (2011). Report on the substantive and methodological evaluation of the various social network indices in the Generations and Gender Survey. (Extern rapport). GGP: Deliverable D12 of the Generations and Gender Programme: A European Research Infrastructure on the Causes and Consequences of Demographic Developments.

J. de Jong Gierveld, P.A. Dykstra & E. Beekink (1999). A growing challenge: The very old. In Population growth and demographic structure. (Extern rapport). New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division

P.A. Dykstra (2015). How laws and policies shape inequalities in and between families. (Extern rapport). : Deliverable 7.5 for the FP-7 funded project “Changing families and sustainable societies: Policy contexts and diversity over the life course and across generations”.

P.A. Dykstra (1999). Ageing in the Netherlands in a macro and micro perspective. In Ageing in Europe: The social, demographic and financialconsequences of Europe’s ageing population (pp. 6-17). The Clingendael Institute

P.A. Dykstra (2007). Older adult loneliness: Myths and realities. In Family, social relations and health in later life. Proceedings of 2007 Seoul National University International Symposium, October 12, 2007 (pp. 31-51)